COMPARING SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMIZATION AND SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Digital Marketing is a revolutionary industry that evolves on a steady basis. There are always new tactics or strategies, new platforms to tap in, emerging shifts in behaviour of users etc . The point is, it’s a full time job staying focused and on top of all these frequent changes in order to keep your brand adequately represented across these internet enabled platforms.

Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Optimization are the key pillars of attaining success online and ensure that it meets the business goals of generating revenue and brand advocates.

So let’s start things by defining the two concepts.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to those strategies that are geared towards an improving the search ranking of your website on sites such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. And so, if you have a valid SEO strategy, then users searching for your product will surely see your website before they even see that of your competitor.

Social Media Optimization (SMO) simply refers to that part of SEO that relates only to all things social. It includes but is not limited to

Social Media community management

Setting up and optimizing social media profiles to ensure visibility

Sharing remarkable content

Responding to user comments

Addressing user complaints in a timely and transparent manner

So with these basic definitions, you begin to get the idea of how both of these concepts how important they are to your core business objectives. So how do both compare or differ you might want to ask.

SIMILARITIES BETWEEN SEO AND SMO

BOTH REQUIRE HIGH QUALITY CONTENT

To have a good SEO and SMO strategy, the underlining factor is the quality of your content. People are more likely to interact with your brand or visit your website if they perceive it to be one that shares high quality content that are relevant, useful and very engaging

BOTH ARE INBOUND FORMS OF MARKETING

Both SEO and SMO are inbound forms of marketing. By this we mean they are both ways of attracting people to your website or social profiles without pushing out marketing messages to them rather showing them value by sharing useful information that make them gain your trust and want to do business with you.

BOTH REQUIRE CONSTANT MONITORING :

Both SEO and SMO require constant monitoring. They are both not an actual science and will always require constant testing and re-testing before getting it right.

BOTH HAVE THE SAME LONG TERM GOALS

In the long term both SEO and SMO aim to help a businesses and brand maximize revenue thus generating a positive ROI

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN SEO AND SMO

MEDIUM

By now, you would have figured this out already but it still needs to be mentioned. SEO is simply about the search engines primarily Google, Yahoo and Bing while SMO is simply about the social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, Periscope, bookmarking websites etc

SHORT TERM PURPOSE

The primary focus of Social Media Optimization in the short term is on community and relationship building while that of SEO is selling to an audience.

DEGREE OF PARTICIPATION

With SMO, you are actively involved in the process of community building, responding to user queries and feedback but with SEO there is no much of an interaction.

TARGET AUDIENCE

Targeting is more specific with SEO than SMO. In SEO, you identify the segment of the audience you wish to attract and then focus the tone of your content to suit them. This may not however be so with Social media optimization

Do you have further contributions to this topic? please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

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